Ghosts, Both Present and Absent, Hover Over Memorable “tick, tick…BOOM!”

From left: Leslie Odom Jr., Lin-Manuel Miranda, Karen Olivo in ‘tick, tick…BOOM!’ at the City Center.

Joan Marcus

Jonathan Larson’s 1990 rock musical “tick, tick… BOOM!” is about an aspiring young songwriter in New York struggling to write a breakthrough show and obsessed with a role model and idol whose full name he cannot bring himself to utter: “Ste— Sond—.”

On Thursday night, that man (we can say his name here: Stephen Sondheim!) was just one of a full cast of interconnected influences and ghosts hovering over a memorable performance of “tick, tick… BOOM!” in New York.

Mr. Sondheim himself was in the audience at the New York City Center, which presented the musical as part of its “Encores! Off Center” series. He saw the lights on stage flicker melodramatically whenever his name was (partially) spoken and heard his own voice on an answering-machine message that figured in a climactic plot twist.

The roster of other ghosts starts with Larson himself, who mined his own life to create “tick, tick.” Larson died in 1996 of an unexpected cardiological episode, on the morning of the first scheduled preview of his musical “Rent.” He never lived to see it become the iconic blockbuster he always dreamed of writing, and was awarded three Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize posthumously.

Lin-Manuel Miranda in ‘tick, tick…BOOM!’

Joan Marcus

Larson went on to exert the same kind of influence over a generation of songwriters that he himself drew from Mr. Sondheim. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who stars in “tick, tick” in the role of “Jon,” wrote in a New York Times essay last week that seeing “tick, tick” changed his own life as a struggling songwriter in New York. Mr. Miranda went on to write and star in his own iconic blockbuster, “In the Heights.”

“It was more than a portrait of the artist as a young man,” Miranda wrote, “it was a sneak preview of what my 20s would be: readings and workshops going nowhere, jobs allowing only flexible hours, relationships ending because the writing comes first and must always come first, watching talented friends adjust their dreams and find happiness in other careers with more stability.”

Before the show at City Center yesterday, Mr. Miranda gave Mr. Sondheim a gift: a framed letter from DuBose Heyward and a program of “Porgy and Bess,” for which Heyward co-wrote the lyrics. The offering, which Mr. Miranda tweeted about afterwards, was a knowing hat-tip to a writer Mr. Sondheim considers one of his own role models. “Heyward’s lyrics for ‘Porgy and Bess’ are, as a set, the most beautiful and powerful in our musical-theater history,” he wrote in his 2010 book “Finishing the Hat.”

On Twitter after Thursday’s performance, Mr. Miranda also paid tribute to another Broadway legend who died earlier that same day: “Performed w/ a heavy heart tonight after hearing of Mary Rodgers’ passing – mother & daughter of great composers, and great composer herself.” The daughter of Richard Rodgers and mother of Adam Guettel (“The Light in the Piazza”), Mary Rodgers Guettel wrote the music for several of her own shows, including “Once Upon a Mattress.”

She was also an old friend of Mr. Sondheim, and an inspiration for the character Mary in “Merrily We Roll Along,” his 1981 musical about three young writers trying to make it big in New York. (As it happens, Mr. Miranda played the Sondheim-esque lyricist Charley in a 2012 revival, on the same City Center stage.) Like Larson, Mr. Sondheim plumbed his own life to capture the ambitions, doubts and yearnings of young artists, especially in a trio called “Opening Doors.” It’s said to be the only number of Mr. Sondheim’s entire career that he considers autobiographical. The song, he wrote, “describes what the struggle was like for me and my generation of Broadway songwriters. I’m sure it must often have seemed frustrating at the time, but in retrospect it strikes me as the most exhilarating period of my professional life.”

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